Many individuals and companies operate e-commerce World Wide Web (“Web”) sites. Customers and potential customers of such Web sites can browse and search for products, purchase products, read and leave reviews for products, and perform other functions. E-commerce Web sites have become one of the primary ways that consumers purchase products today.
Many different components typically operate in conjunction with one another in order to provide e-commerce Web sites. For example, many different software components may be executed in order to generate a product detail page for a product offered for sale through an e-commerce Web site. Each of the components may be responsible for generating a different portion of the product detail page.
In order to generate a portion of a product detail page, some software components might require facts about the product represented on the page. For example, one component might require facts that identify the size and the weight of the product. Another component might require facts that indicate the number of the products that are currently in stock with a merchant. Other components might require other facts about a product in order to generate their respective portions of the product detail page for the product.
Software components typically obtain facts about a product from one or more back end systems. For example, various back end systems may be utilized to maintain a product catalog containing product specifications, product inventory levels, and other facts about a product. If these back end systems are slow to respond to requests for facts, however, the software components requesting the facts can be delayed in generating their respective portions of a product detail page. Consequently, the product detail page may be delivered slowly to the device that requested the page. Slow response times can be frustrating to the users of an e-commerce Web site and may lead the users to shop at other sites. It is with respect to these and other considerations that the disclosure made herein is presented.